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Verified By BOOM 50

Verified By BOOM 50

💃Viral Dance Teacher, Then: Daily Wage Labourer

June 03, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Browser View | June 3, 2023 | Subscribe

Good Morning, . A daily wage labourer, who once balanced life between dance and working at construction sites, now has students coming to his class from the Asansol town in West Bengal and its peripheries.

This, and how AI was used to discredit protesting wrestlers + why cheetahs are not surviving in India. Read on!

The ongoing wrestlers' protest against the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president Brij Bhushan Saran Singh has been in the news for quite a while now.

But, it has been one of the prominent topics in the misinformation space too.

This week, an image showing wrestler Vinesh Phogat, Sangeeta Phogat, and others smiling inside a police van went viral on social media.

Users sharing it to insinuate that the protest, and recent clashes with the police are an act for the camera.

Well, it's an edited image.

Just like how there are different tools for fact-checking, similarly, there are several tools to create fake and fabricated content.
Protesting wrestler Bajrang Punia and several other social media users began sharing another version of the same image which was an exact match with the viral photo, albeit without the smiles on the faces of the protestors.

Et voila! It's AI at play!

We ran the image shared by Punia through different AI-based editing apps to digitally add smiles to the faces.
The editing app called "Face App" rendered a result which was an exact match with the viral image.

Read this fact-check by BOOM's Archis Chowdhury to watch a detailed screen recording of the process.

17 Fact-Checks Published

35% of the false claims were Political in nature, followed by Communal at 18% and Scripted Content at 12%.

🏏 IPL was a prominent theme this week, due to the tournament’s much hyped finale. Other prominent topics included: ongoing wrestlers’ protest and love jihad.

Read our Twitter thread to know the detailed analysis by Debraj Sarkar.

#BOOMWeeklyReport 🧵BOOM published a total of 17 fact-checks this week. 35% of the false claims were Political in nature, followed by Communal at 18% and Scripted Content at 12%.
#BOOMFactCheck#Thread (1/n)
— BOOM Live (@boomlive_in)
10:37 AM • Jun 2, 2023

💃 How A Daily Wage Labourer Started An Insta-Viral Dance Academy

🔖 About 20km away from West Bengal's Asansol, inside a nondescript brick structure that makes up two rooms covered with a tin roof, about six to seven girls are perfecting dance moves. Some of them are stretching before they begin their dance rehearsals for the day. The room they are practising in has a fan, the other doesn’t.

“We are getting ready for a competition and not winning is not an option for my students,” said Ajay Todi, 28, known as JD Sir to the people in the village.

These two rooms are his academy.

Read how Dipanjan Sinha profiled Todi, who once balanced life between dance and working at construction sites.

🐆 Why Are Cheetahs Not Surviving In India?

🔖 In the past two months, the death toll of cheetahs in Kuno National Park, Madhya Pradesh has risen to six.

Among the casualties were:

Two cubs born to Jwala, a female cheetah who was first named Siyaya.
In March, Sasha, a male cheetah from Namibia, died due to a kidney ailment, and Uday, a South African male cheetah, fell ill and died last month.

BOOM's Kaisar Andrabi spoke to wildlife experts to understand why cheetahs are not surviving in India.

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 An old photo showing a billboard in Andhra Pradesh with the text "Modi No Entry" was shared with a false claim that it is from Rajasthan during PM Narendra Modi's visit to the state.

🔗Anmol Alphonso↗️ debunked the claim.

🔍 An old photograph was shared with the false claim that it showed Olympic bronze medalist wrestler Sakshee Malikkh being pinned down and stamped on her face with police boots for protesting against the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president Brij Bhushan Saran Singh. Read this fact-check by🔗Srijit Das↗️ to know the facts about the picture.

🔍 AI at play: 🔗Anmol Alphonso↗️ debunked a set of AI-generated photos showing Hollywood actor and former professional wrestler Dwayne Johnson known by his ring name "The Rock" dressed as a priest performing Hindu prayer rituals. It was shared with the false claim that he has embraced Hinduism.

🔍 Several posts claiming that Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal has announced that he will resign from the chief ministerial position to support the ongoing wrestlers' protest are false. Read this fact-check by🔗Srijit Das↗️.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: Fighting Deepfakes: Media and Internet Giants’ converging and diverging strategies against Hi-tech Misinformation by Angel Visozo, Martin Vaz-Alvarez, and Xose Lopez-Garcia

This article chronicles the remedial countermeasures put in place by journalistic organisations and social media companies to deal with the problem around deepfakes.

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Verified By Boom is written by Divya Chandra, edited by Adrija Bose

and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

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